Onside and on the ball

Sports films invariably annoy the initiated with their technical inaccuracies and often bore the rest of us. But Danny Cannon's Goal! is much better than most, with a real feel for both the power of football to grip the soul, and for those young men who are desperate to become part of the professional game.

The young man in question here is a Mexican illegal, noticed by a former scout in Los Angeles, and half-promised a trial with Newcastle.

Despite his father's opposition, he gets to England somehow, disappoints in his first clogging trial on a rain-soaked pitch, loses his asthma inhibitor in his second, gets sacked and then reprieved, and finally turns out for first the reserves and then the first team.

It's a wobbly ascent from disaster to triumph, helped along by a romance with Anna Friel's local nurse.

Mexican Kuno Becker, who could pass for Michael Owen in a thunderstorm, plays the lead modestly and well. Stephen Dillane is good as the scout, and Alessandro Nivola credible as the expensive but wastrel Newcastle signing who takes the lad under his wing.

Best of all is the Romanian Marcel Iures as a team manager about as unlike Graham Souness as it is possible to get.

Goal!
Cert: 12A